Alex,

Nice pictures…thanks for sharing. I don’t have any elk hunting pictures yet but hopefully someday! Here is one of a October snow we had a few years ago while I was out in the corn sneaking around for white tails.

CO elk country as it now appears … it always happens in June, when the elk calves and deer fawns are being born and helpless to run away.

Same area in better times …

Those are some great looking wild places. I’m not elk hunting this year, have to go out of state if I want to get a tag over the counter. But I thought I’d throw these pics in the mix. No photoshop here, these elk were down on the beach feeding in the dunes and looking out over the ocean!

Seeing Tules on the beach is a great reminder of how adaptable elk really are. Even many of the places we typically associate with “elk habitat” are not all that representative of where they lived historically; only of where they have been pushed to by civilization.

A few more:

Bruce,

Looks like those aspens you are leaning against have seen some elk use in the past.

These ones by the beach happen to be Roosevelt Elk, up here in Humboldt County.

I agree, most large-wild game lives where it can now, usually not occupying their entire prehistorical range. However, some animals, e.g., white-tailed deer, are possibly more abundant than ever before.

preston

Alex — I found the pristine quartzite knife blade point yesterday in a place you have walked over many times. While the pic doesn’t show much of elk country but a few inches of dirt, to find what was once no doubt a skinning knife near where I’ve hunted for half of my life, well, I have to take that as a good omen for the coming elk season!

Very cool find, Dave. I think that is a good omen!

There are some areas where we hunt chukar that I find all kinds of worked obsidian and chert all over the ground, and have found some nice points. Sometimes, I forget that we’re there to find birds, I get so caught up in looking around my feet. 😆

Smithy, yes! Damned if I know why I’ve never indulged myself in my lifelong passion for the stone age, and taken a vacation dedicated to just searching for human history writ in stone. But it doesn’t mean as much if it isn’t local, eh? Although … many years ago, when we lived briefly in Red Lodge, MT, we visited the Madison River buffalo jump site, where there are still, or were then, several perfect small tipi rings (circles of stone that were used to anchor down the bottom edges of tipis). While poking around among the many bison bones at the bottom of the jump, and trying to avoid the copious rattlers there, I found a tiny blue trade bead. What a rush! I buried in within one of the tipi rings, forever I hope. Another time, after an old timer in Big Timber told us where we could find a historic Crow tree burial site along the Yellowstone, sure enough we found the remnants of burial platforms in ancient cottonwoods right on the river and a scattering of beads beneath. How the remained after a century of souvenir collectors I can’t say, but the visible ones I reburied on the spot. For me, history doesn’t count unless it’s prehistory. Or so says he, after a Mex and Margie dinner. What am I doing here?

Great find. Few things get me more excited or reflective than finding pieces of the pre-1492 past. Especially when they’re associated with places we closely identify with; places we belong to. It’s a mighty special feeling to find an arrow point or a blade near where you yourself have taken or pursued game. My son and I found a nice hand blade and tiny triangle “bird” point last weekend in one of our small fields. Tools that may well have been used on the ancestors of the very deer I have killed in that place.

Sorry for the tangent, it just fascinates me. Let’s see some more of those elk country pics!